Leaves of a Book
by Mulderzkid
Summary: “Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title.” Virgina Woolf


_**Leaves of a Book  
Ali Cherry  
Rating: T- later chapters  
Spoilers: Nothing definate, but up to Driven (4.11)**_

**_Summary: _**He just realized that if he ever wanted to have any idea as to what was going on, he had to figure it out for himself.

"_**Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title" Virgina Woolf**_

Since the age of five, Anthony DiNozzo had been a sneak. Sneaking into other's rooms, prying into their secrets, their not so secrets, being what Kate used to call annoying. At that tender age, Tony didn't realize that it was annoying. He just realized that if he ever wanted to have any idea as to what was going on, he had to figure it out for himself. Five was the age when Anthony crept carefully down the stairs to get a cup of tea for his elderly, distant nanny, who had insisted that she would die and leave him if he didn't fetch a cup of tea for her at that precise instant.

It was raining outside; the water on the glass front entry doors casting sliding tears down Anthony's small body. It wasn't the first time he had been sent to get tea, but unlike most days the staff was no where around. No Maria dusting in the living room, no Paulo out buffing the limo. No Reynaldo in the dining room polishing the silver—again. No one was around, so Anthony made his way to the kitchen, the home of Lucia, the cook from L'Italia, who demanded Italian commands and who had a very forceful personality. Anthony was terrified of her. His Italian had never been as good as his English, he could understand it perfectly as it was spoken almost entirely in the house, with the exception of his mother and his nanny, but speaking it…well, when you were forbidden to speak, how do you practice the sounds, the accent, the words?

So Tony crept very slowly to the door to the kitchen and watched that his steps were not overly loud. Lucia did not like children. Did not tolerate Tony's wild adventures, even when they were not so wild to him. She was a firm believer in the idea of children being never seen and never heard, and she ruled the house. So Anthony stopped at the door and squared his shoulders, taking a deep breath and steeled his young heart to be yelled at….again. Then he heard it; loud rambunctious laughter and words. Words yelled with giggles, warmth where there had always been stilted formality.

"And then the stupid child looks up at me and says, 'Mud pie, Sig. Eduardo.'"

Anthony grinned remembering last week when he had been sent out to play and had found the freshly weeded earth of the rose gardens. He had patted it together like the pancakes he had seen on television. Had imagined offering them to his mom when she wasn't ill with her morning complaint, not that that happened very often, but Tony figured if Mud could be pancakes then his mom could be not red-eyed, slurry and crackly every morning. He sometimes wondered what it would be like if his mom behaved like Harriet from TV, but he never crossed that line. Dreaming of what would never be was like telling God that what he had wasn't enough. And according to Father Vestry, when you had enough, asking for more was a sin.

"He is a stupid little boy, who does not realize when no one cares about him." Reynaldo's voice was clipped and scathing.

"He doesn't even realize that his parents are gone again to _La Francia_."

Tony wants to look up France in his Atlas and mark it. Sometimes his mother will help him find where they are going before they leave. Sometimes she forgets, but he'll ask when she's back.

"I hear that Anthony's not even Sig. Dinozzo's child. The mother played him false."

That was news to Anthony. He thought he looked a lot like his father. They had the same eyes didn't they? His mother had blue eyes, so he had to have green like his dad, right? His father didn't really see Tony much, but his mother had patted him on the head and said he had his father's eyes. He remembers that now.

"They leave him constantly. They should just send him away to school rather than keep him here under our feet." Lucia's strident tones echoed in the hallway and Tony wondered if he was going away to school. His mother had mentioned it to one of her friends while she showed off Tony in his embarrassing sailor outfit.

"We should cut the kid some slack, it's not his fault no one wants him. Give him some years, and then he won't be bugging us anymore." Tony's hand stopped in the process of knocking on the door. He hadn't realized that he bugged Paulo, the chauffeur. He stayed out his way, for the most part. Occasionally he'd sit in the tall bushes in the front where no one could see him and watch the circles that Paulo rubbed into the gleaming black car. It was hypnotic to Anthony and no one even knew he was there, but obviously not, he had obviously bugged Paulo somehow. Tony wasn't sure he wanted to hear anymore, so he knocked politely and waited for someone to open the door.

Reynaldo pulled open the door and glared down at him. "Yes?"

"_Pardon me, posso prego avere una tazza di tè? È per il Nanny Nelson_." Tony's tongue tripped over the request for tea for Nanny Nelson making him stutter.

Reynaldo's eyes squinted in suspicion at Tony and then he barked, "_Attesa qui_."

While he waited Tony considered what he had learned.

His parents have gone to France

He might not be his father's son

None of the staff like him- he isn't so surprised about this.

He is being sent away to school somewhere.

He thought about everything the staff said simply because they didn't realize he was there and he liked it.

That night as the house slept, Tony slipped quietly into his mother's room, there was a picture book of photographs on her beside table, and Tony picked it quietly up and took it into her dressing area. The light from a flashlight he snagged was enough as Tony scrutinized the picture of his father and his own image in the mirror. His father's eyes were green, kind of like Tony's eyes. Tony searched for something else of his father in his face and saw none. What did that mean? Tony doesn't know, so he turned off the flashlight, put away the picture book, minus the picture of his father and crept back to his bedroom, stashing both the picture and the flashlight in his record player.

"**_I've never tried to block out the memories of the past, even though some are painful. I don't understand people who hide from their past. Everything you live through helps to make you the person you are now." Sophia Loren_**


End file.
